What hinders creativity? Investigating middle school students' perceived influence of barriers to creativity for improving school creativity friendliness

In recent years, cultivation of students' creativity is a widely recognized goal of modern education. Yet, various barriers hinder the expression of creative ability within the school context. The influence of many barriers that research has identified may vary within different cultural contexts as well as in relation to individual creative ability. In this regard, the present study investigated the perceived influence of certain barriers to creativity on Greek secondary students in terms of their gender and creative ability. For the purposes of the study, 152 young adolescents completed the translated version of Barriers to Personal Creativity (ALENCAR, 1996; MORAIS et al., 2014), while their creative potential was evaluated by the graphic-artistic scales of the Evaluation of Creative Potential Battery (EPoC). Results demonstrated that barriers such as lack of time and opportunities, inhibition, shyness and lack of motivation were perceived by participants as common obstacles that considerably affect their creativity, whilst social repression was reported to be affecting their creativity to a lesser degree. In general, perceptions of obstacles to creativity did not appear to significantly affect students' creative potential or gender. In this regard, the perceived high influence of specific inhibitors to creativity reflected a climate in Greek schools which in general seems to be of limited friendliness towards creativity. Thus, interventions for enhancing students' creativity should focus on removing such barriers and improving the school climate.